Electronic mail is a tool for allowing people to send and receive messages from networked computers. Typically, each individual, or user, has a unique email address on a networked computer, such as an internet email address. The user's internet address commonly follows a standard format, called the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS addresses take the form of: EQU username@hostname.subdomain.sub.n-1). . subdomain.sub.(1) !subdomain.sub.(0) .domain
Thus, for example, if your name is Jack Beanstalk and you work in the doughnut division of Acme Foods, Inc., then your typical email address might be of the form: EQU jackbeanstalk@doughnuts.acmefoods.com
The username, "jackbeanstal", is the login name assigned to the sender's user account on a particular networked computer. The hostname, "doughnuts", is the name of the computer (or cluster of computers) on which the individual's email account resides. In this case, doughnuts perhaps represents an organization in Acme Foods. The subdomain, "acmefoods", is usually the name of the company, university, or other organization. There may be more than one subdomain after the hostname, whereupon any two adjacent subdomain names are separated by a period in between. The domain name is the highest level in the Domain Name System. Acmefoods belongs to the "com" domain, along with other commercial organizations. Other top-level domains include "gov" (government institutions), "edu" (educational institutions), "org" (public and private organizations), "mil" (branches of the military), and "net" (major network support centers). There are also some country domains, such as "uk" (United Kingdom) or "oz" (Australia) for national networks outside the United States.
Given a user email address, it may be desirable to locate the individual's U.S. postal address, or in the case of a corporate entity, the corporation's U.S. postal address. A number of internet white page services provide databases of email addresses, such as Four 11 Corporation, located at 1370 Willow Road, Suite 200, Menlo Park, Calif. 94025 and PARSSEC Web Communications, 2570 West El Camino Real, Suite 309, Mountain View, Calif. 94040. Records in these databases include an email address, usually a name as well, and occasionally a USPS address. Other companies, such as ProCD, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danver, Mass 01923-4520 and American Business Information, Inc. (also known as "ABI"), 5711 South 86th Circle, Omaha, Nev. 68127, are focused on capturing the entirety of traditional paper phonebook information in electronic form. Finally, Internet services such as Dejanews, Inc., located 5407-B Clay Avenue, Austin, Tex. 78756, maintain voluminous databases of postings made to public forums on the Internet, including Usenet and publicly accessible mailing lists. These services provide a way for comprehensively searching postings to public forums including by name, organization and email address. None of these services, however, provide an automated mechanism for mapping a user's email address to and from the user's corresponding U.S. postal address. Furthermore, email addresses do not follow a uniform naming convention that would simplify identifying the user's actual name, which can then be cross-referenced to a white page database. It is thus desirable to provide a method or apparatus that would locate a user's U.S. postal address given the user's email address.